Commenting mainly on France and U.S.policy in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Author of "Web of Deceit, the History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush." Now finishing a novel, "The Watchman's File," delving into Israel's most closely-guarded secret. [It's not the bomb.]

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Friday, February 8, 2013

Drone Wars: Ragheads--4000 vs Americans- 3

Earlier
this week, NBC News revealed a secret Department of Justice memo entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Against a U.S.
Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force.”

NBC’s
scoop has since fueled mounting outrage over the Obama administration’s drone
policy. What is most troubling about the indignation, however, is how much it’s
focused on the fact that, my God, President Obama is even using drone’s to knock
off his own people.

Or
as a shocked Rachel Maddow put it, “Even an American citizen can be killed.”

Senator
Ron Wyden proclaimed,
“Americans have a right to know when their government thinks it’s allowed to
kill them.”

The
American the Justice Department memo referred
to was Nasser al-Awlak, a radical Islamic cleric and American and Yemeni citizen,
suspected of being head of operations for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninusula.
He was also implicated in the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood Texas and the
attempted 2011 Times Square bombing by Faisal Shahzad.

Two
weeks after he was blown apart in Yemen in 2011, his 16 year-old son was
obliterated in another drone strike, also directed under the CIA’s secret
guidelines.

The
son’s death was much more shocking than his father’s.

One
other American has also been killed by Drone strikes.

But,
much more shocking is the fact
that over the past few years, U.S. drones have made mincemeat out of an
estimated 3000 to 4000 others—non Americans--in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen,
and Somalia.At least 200 of them
were children.

The
figures are very rough because no one--certainly not the U.S. government--is
releasing an accurate count. The London based
Center for Investigative reporting, which attempts to track the drone strikes,
has been able to identify by name only a few hundred of the actual victims. Who
knows what their political affiliations really were? Or even less, what
considerations—legal and otherwise—went into justifying their demise?

“It’s
a terrifying situation.” Jennifer Gibson, an American lawyer in London with
Reprieve, an organization taking on the “drone war” issue. “There are villages
in Pakistan,” she says “that have drones flying over them 24 hours a day.
Sometimes they’ll stay for weeks. But my clients and people there have no way
of knowing if they are being targeted. Or what kind of behavior is likely to
get them killed. They don’t know if the person riding beside them in a car or
walking with them in the marketplace may be a target.It’s terrorizing entire
communities. Even after an attack, there is no acknowledging by the U.S.
government, no response at all, absolutely no accountability. And the vast
majority of casualties don’t even have names attached to them.”

Christof
Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or
arbitrary executions, told
a conference in Geneva that President Obama's attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried
out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-established human
rights standards. He suggested that some strikes may even constitute “war
crimes”.

But,
few Americans seem to carry about U.N. rapporteurs. It’s only when Americans are potential targets for
those drones, that Congress and the media get stirred up.

And
they’re probably right. A recent poll
taken by Farleigh Dickinson University’s Public Mind, found that by a two to
one margin (48% to 24%) American voters say they think it’s illegal for the
U.S. government to target its own citizens abroad with drone strikes.

But,
when it comes to using drones to carry out attacks abroad “on people and other
targets deemed a threat to the U.S.” voters were in favor of a margin of
six-to-one [75% to 13%].

The
American Civil Liberties Union and the Centre for Constitutional Rights (The
CCR) have been demanding
a court hearing in the United States to determine whether the former head
of the CIA Leon Panetta was guilty of having depriving Nasser al-Awlak and his
son of their constitutional right to life.

Maria
LaHood, an attorney with the CCR frankly admitted to me that they are concentrating
on the two American cases, because that’s the really the only way to get Americans
to focus on the problem. Also because that’s really the best hope they have of
getting an American court to actually agree to hear their case.

‘What
we’re also hoping” she says, “is that if we do get anywhere with this case,
then we can get a legal interpretation from the court that would apply to
everyone--not just Americans. But getting a court to hear this case is going to
be a battle in itself.”

Reprieve is also active in the
courts—in Pakistan. Though the Pakistani ambassador in Washington has complained
about the drone strikes, his government has done little to prevent them.Reprieve
now is backing a case in Peshawar to oblige
the Pakistani government to take action against the drones--to protect the
constitutional right to life of its own citizens.

What
particularly concerns Reprieve attorney
Jennifer Gibson is the very nature of the convoluted 16-page memo that
describes the Justice Department’s rationale for okaying the killing of an American,
even outside of a war zone.

“If
the U.S. has such vague, ambiguous standards where Americans are concerned, if
they they’ve set the bar so low for their own citizens, who knows what the
standards are for killing non Americans?”

In
other words, if Justice Department lawyers labored so mightily on producing a
memo setting the guidelines for killing an American citizen, one can only
presume that the guidelines must be much different for those who inhabit the
rest of the world.

@barrylando

About Me

Originally from Vancouver, studied at Harvard, Harvard Law and Columbia University, then correspondent for Time Life in South America, and 30 years as Producer with 60 Minutes in Washington D.C. and Paris, where I now live. Wrote book on history of Western Invervention in Iraq, Web of Deceit, now writing a novel, painting, travelling, visiting friends and relatives.